The present invention relates to an electronic apparatus, a display control method for the electronic apparatus, a graphical user interface, and a display control program to display many items to be provided, such as content and functions, on a screen so that a user can select one of the items.
Media used to provide image or music content have diversified, and types and amount of provided content have been increasing. Furthermore, mass-storage hard disk devices and semiconductor memories have been used as storage media (content storing units) to store the content, so that various types of and a large amount of content can be provided.
Conventionally, a so-called multimedia playback apparatus capable of playing back content stored in various media has been proposed (e.g., see Patent Document 1: Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 11-73428).
Also, the following system has been available. That is, in the system, an electronic apparatus functioning as a content playback apparatus is connected to a personal computer or a server to store video content or music content through a network, such as a LAN (local area network). The electronic apparatus can obtain the content from the personal computer or the server and play back the content.
The above-described electronic apparatus having a content playback function should desirably have a graphical user interface enabling a user to quickly search for content to be played back.
In such a type of graphical user interface, a menu listing representation images to represent respective pieces of content by titles or thumbnails is displayed on a screen as items to be selected by a user, so that the user can select a desired piece of content through the display.
In this case, the representation images are displayed by obtaining accompanying information (meta-information), such as content titles or thumbnails, from a storage medium serving as a content providing source. Thus, if much time takes to obtain the meta-information, it is difficult to quickly provide a user with representation images to select content.
In particular, when representation images of content are displayed by obtaining the meta-information from a storage medium, such as a personal computer or a server, connected to the electronic apparatus through a network, it is difficult in the electronic apparatus to quickly display all of the representation images of the content if network delay occurs.
In a conventionally-adopted method, representation images of content found through a network are sequentially displayed in the electronic apparatus immediately after each of the images are found so that a user can recognize the content stored in an apparatus connected through the network without stress.
In this method, however, if the user wants to select the last piece of the content stored in the apparatus connected through the network, the user can select the last piece of the content only after meta-information about all pieces of the content has been obtained and the representation images thereof have been displayed.
For example, assume that it takes t seconds to obtain meta-information of one piece of content. In that case, it takes n×t seconds to obtain meta-information of n pieces of the content. The user has to wait for this time period before selecting a piece of the content.